Screams echo into the night air. Maniacal laughter soon follows. Students anxiously await their turn to enter the haunted house.
SMU Global Medical Brigades (GMB) put on their first ever haunted house Saturday night, just outside McElvaney Commons. Each year, GMB fundraises to coordinate a seven day medical brigade to a developing country with limited health care access. The haunted house was a part of this year’s fundraising.
“We actually had to rework our original idea the day before,” Kaitlin Ostling, sophomore and GMB’s fundraising chair, said.
Highland Park has specific rules for haunted houses in buildings. The group only found out about these rules Friday. They spent all Saturday rebuilding their idea to work outside.
And it paid off. Sophomore Grant Meadows enjoyed the haunted house.
“This is definitely one of the better haunted houses,” he said. “I thought it was a great presentation. They really played up the fear with a variety of different ways to scare you.”
The haunted house was actually made to be a haunted hospital. According to the tour guide, visitors are actually CDC inspectors. The “hospital” is working to get up to code, but is not there quite yet.
Students navigate their way past an abandoned nursery, a dangerous medical experiment and through a psych ward.
“It looked like people were being killed with fake blood,” Meadows said. “You walk right past a horrible medical experiment. I thought it was great.”
Junior Regan Redford was one of the actors in the house. She played a mental patient in the psych ward.
“None of us have any experience acting or scaring or making blood,” she said. “But once I saw that we had a great team doing all of it together, I was really excited to be a part of it.”
Redford also went on GMB’s trip to Panama last August.
“It’s really cool to see a culture that appreciates everything that they have because here we kind of take things for granted,” she said. “It’s gratifying to see the impact that we make.”
SMU Global Medical Brigades welcomes members of all majors – not just those in the sciences or with a medical emphasis. GMB also plans to host a haunted house on campus yearly.
